I'd rather see faster IO than built-in wireless. I can easily add a dongle for wifi or bluetooth if I want it, but the current architectural constraints mean the Pi's not a great board for a low-end, low-power file server.

it is 2010, my old athlon XP i bought in 2003 already has two sata ports, my GFs old Pentium 4 has SATA hard drives. I switched to only getting Sata drives in 2005. I really am curious where you found a 2006 machine with NO sata port...

besides, my fav computershop (actual shop with their own stock), lists 4 different IDE drives on their shelves (and in stock currently, the fifth type isnt), ranging from 80 to 320 GB.

Ram and VGA cards tend to be a bit more difficult, but if you dont mind paying a bit more per performance, AGP cards are still readily available, as is DDR ram.

I still agree with the GP though, restoring old machines (esp. servers) often isnt very economical once you need more then one or two spare parts, but for non-obscure hardware most parts are still available (come to think of it, i can still buy socket A mobo's new....)

Right, BSD licensing does not give the freedom to license BSD code under a different license just because you make modifications to it. No license allows that, so you can't really call it a restriction.

Putting something into the public domain does allow re-licensing. And yes, the public domain _is_ a form of licence.

$40K doesn't go very far when a one bedroom apartment in the Chicago area goes for over $900/month (and when I was paying that, people still broke into my car so that's not even a neighborhood I'd consider fit for raising kids), food, auto financing, auto insurance, clothes, and utilities. That's pretty much break even. You know $4000 is 10% of $40K and the feds take a good chunk of that 40K before you even see it. That's some ugly break even accounting after filing taxes and putting that money away. Heaven forbid someone wants to have money for retirement, or even thinking about Christmas (for their kids), school supplies or if they get into an accident.